Modern natural language interfaces to databases: Composing statistical parsing with semantic tractability

Abstract

Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIs) can benefit from the advances in statistical parsing over the last fifteen years or so. However, statistical parsers require training on a massive, labeled corpus, and manually creating such a corpus for each database is prohibitively expensive. To address this quandary, this paper reports on the PRECISE NLI, which uses a statistical parser as a “plug in”. The paper shows how a strong semantic model coupled with “light re-training” enables PRECISE to overcome parser errors, and correctly map from parsed questions to the corresponding SQL queries. We discuss the issues in using statistical parsers to build database-independent NLIs, and report on experimental results with the benchmark ATIS data set where PRECISE achieves 94% accuracy.